


Last Call

by bobtailsquid



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alcohol, Dark Comedy, Dimension Travel, M/M, Post-Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions Compliant, liminal spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 02:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30031527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobtailsquid/pseuds/bobtailsquid
Summary: So, Atem and Kaiba walk into a bar...
Relationships: Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi | Atem
Comments: 11
Kudos: 29
Collections: Dark Pride of Dimensions Drabble Night Collection





	Last Call

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dark Pride of Dimensions Drabble Night: "intoxication"
> 
> With apologies and gratitude to Douglas Adams and Antoine Volodine for so graciously letting me jack certain elements of style. I had fun :)

Something went wrong, because of course it did. The wrong coordinates. A loose wire. An o-ring burped. Due to sophisticated, inexplicable problems with interdimensional travel, the dimension they wanted to return to was no longer where they left it. A key-ring dimension missing from the kitchen counter. Something scientific: Kaiba's preferred type of accident, because it could be observed, hypothesized, tested, analyzed, and confirmed, and perhaps the accident could be repeated, for kicks. That was the explanation he swallowed whole, with a chalky gulp, because otherwise he was going to get a headache.

Something went wrong, because of course it did, and it was simply the universe taking them on a detour, in a sentient way. Watchmaker theory, a divine Father, a _sunnum bonum_ , a monistic substrate, the Unmoved Movers, Ma’at and the primordial chaos waters of Nu, turtles all the way down. All of it, some of it, or none of it. All that mattered was that the dark spaces between the stars were not as empty as they seemed. Don’t worry, Kaiba. Astrophysics is still working exactly the way it’s supposed to work, and yes, space is still a vacuum - because desire is the space where something should be, but isn’t, and gravity is just the way stars want each other. And despite Kaiba's best attempts, and the proud, scissor-blade sleekness of his little ship as it rose smoothly off the sands of Aaru and slid through a cut in the sky, the universe wanted them here instead of home: Atem’s explanation.

“Where are we?” he said, his voice a meek, awed whisper, traveling only as far as the transparent canopy of the Dimension Cannon. Above him was an unfamiliar purple-black night sky, its constellations still unnamed. The Divine Lion, the constellation of his birth, was gone. So were the Two Ladies, The Ferryboat, The Red One of the Prow, and the Female Hippopotamus. 

Below him was Kaiba, who had come up with nothing better than to let him sit on his lap - a deliberate failure of imagination, although he’d never admit it. Kaiba had one arm seatbelted around his waist, their hips flush together. Neither of them said anything about it. What needed to be said, really, that the simple weight of Atem sitting on Kaiba wasn't saying already?

Kaiba reached around him to the controls, first attempting to look over his shoulder, then under his arm, in an impromptu game of Atem-limbo. He flipped switches and tested dials, hitting the thick of his palm hard against the command console several times, as though trying to knock some sense into it. The information displayed on the main screen remained resolutely nonsensical, the graphs escaping into anti-mathematical freedom, bursting with firework cascades of pixels. YOU MIGHT BE LOST, a smaller screen flashed, on and off. MAYBE.

“I’m not even getting a signal,” Kaiba growled, fumbling under the command console until the jaw of a small compartment popped open, revealing a mouthful of blinking lights, flossed with a multitude of wires.

It was impossible to stay out of his way. So Atem settled for turning sideways and sitting with his back against the side of the Dimension Cannon’s cockpit, giving Kaiba room to work in the valley between his chest and his drawn-up thighs. He looked sideways through the canopy, which had turned cold, little clouds gathering on the glass with every breath. 

All around them was a dark, burgundy desert, rocky and crenellated with buttes. No greenery that he could see, not even a tumbleweed. No roads or any other artificial form that implied the presence of life instead of mineral. They were, as far as he could tell, completely alone. 

_That_ thought was more unnerving than anything else, even the unnamed constellations that glittered down at them like loose teeth in a pool of ink. 

Kaiba leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms, studying the command console with an unmoving marble-carved frown. The silence was absolute. Atem heard only his own heartbeat, moving at a horse-trot tempo, ready to run at any moment.

For a long time, they didn’t move. The air started to chill. Atem pulled his purple cloak around his shoulders and made excellent use of the excuse, curling into Kaiba’s chest. He had no doubt Kaiba would find a way to fix the ship, but if they didn’t… at least he’d die cuddling the bastard for warmth. Finally. _And in a cool cyberpunk sarcophagus!_ he heard Jounouchi say.

“There’s a light over there,” Kaiba said suddenly.

“What? Where?” Atem said. 

“There.” 

Kaiba nodded into the distance.

Some several hundred meters away, across a flat stretch of desert, was the shallow, rocky slope of a butte, ridged into horizontal layers. A sheet of red light rose up from the rock, so bright the seam where it met the rock was a solid orange. It was a shade of red comorbid with smeared lipstick and torn fishnets, fake names, graffiti on the bathroom stalls; a livid, infected red.

Compared to everything else around them, the vast, existential nothingness of their location, it seemed to be of human make. Someone else had been here, installing strange lights in the ground. 

What should have been reassuring was not. 

Atem drew his cloak tighter around himself, snuggling closer into Kaiba, who allowed it, his muscular pride flattered and his fraternal instinct to protect scooping up pharaohs now. 

"Why red?" Atem said. "A warning?"

"Who's to say red has a consistent meaning across dimensions?" Kaiba said. "It doesn't even have a consistent meaning in _our_ dimension."

"I see your point. Red is also lucky," Atem recited, like a good student. "Red is love. Red is danger."

"Now you're just repeating yourself."

Atem snorted out a little laugh under his breath. Yes. Resting his head on Kaiba's shoulder was dangerous. 

"Red is the inside of your coat," he said.

"That's magenta. I loathe the color red."

"Do you loathe my eyes?"

Kaiba frowned down at him, his face blue-grey under the deep, clear night. Atem widened his eyes, so he could see them better. Stars whirled above them, several hundred thousand miles in a single second, half a nanometer across the sky. 

"Your eyes have at least six different colors," he said factually. 

"So you do or you don't?!"

"Isn't it obvious?" Kaiba said.

Without warning, he hit a button on the side of the command console. With a hiss of valves, the canopy withdrew, exposing them to the atmosphere. Cold, dusty air flooded into the cockpit. 

“Kaiba, that was madness,” Atem said. “The air could’ve been toxic, like the surface of Tioumoutiri-Ouaiti.”

“What do you care? If you die, just take the express train back to Aaru. It leaves every hour on the hour,” Kaiba said. “Move. Out. One small step for me, one giant leap for a shrimp pharaoh.”

“Bastard,” Atem muttered, twisting and unfolding himself, pharaoh-gami in reverse. “What about you?”

He swung a leg over the side of the Dimension Ship and dropped to the ground with a puff of dust, his cloak flapping like bird wings behind him. Kaiba landed next to him, coat billowing, a much bigger, bolder bird, making a bigger puff of dust.

"Die from toxic gases out here, or die from doing nothing in there. Doesn't matter," Kaiba said, straightening his coat. He reached back into the Dimension Ship, rooted around, and pulled out his Duel Disk.

"We could've... talked or something," Atem said.

"So you want to talk me to death?"

Atem scowled, but found its explosive power handily and easily defused. Kaiba was smiling at him. 

* * *

They walked across the desert towards the red light, Kaiba's boots crunching the pebbles underfoot, Atem feeling every one of them through the thin soles of his slippers. Every so often he turned to look back at the Dimension Cannon, lying like a knocked-out tooth in the desert, its dark curves gleaming with the light of the unnamed stars. Kaiba did not look back. 

They scrabbled over the rocks at the foothill of the butte, up to the red light. Kaiba hauled himself onto a boulder and turned around, grabbing Atem's outstretched hands, bracing his boots on the rock as he pulled him up. At a different wall of rock he dropped to one knee and laced his own hands together, effortlessly pumping power into Atem's upwards step. This choreography went unremarked on between them; Atem because it wounded his pride to be defeated by rocks simply because they were bigger than him - not smarter or sharper or more cunning, but just LARGER - and Kaiba because he was still stubbornly resisting meaning.

All around them the boulders were awash in orange-red light, all the colors of their clothing and their faces invaded by a hazy apocalyptic sheen. 

"Final bets on what it is?" Atem said, on the home stretch.

"An interstellar lighthouse, warning travelers away," Kaiba said. "A billboard of advertisements for five-dimensional consumers. Or the lure of an alien anglerfish, and we're the prey."

"So you hopped out of the Dimension Cannon and walked right up to it."

"If it _is_ an anglerfish, I win the bet. What do _you_ think it is?"

Atem frowned and stalled for time, sticking a finger into his slipper, feeling for an annoying pebble intruder.

"A streetlight over a cosmic sidewalk, lighting people's way home through the universe.”

“That’s nonsense,” Kaiba snorted.

“What? Why?!” Atem protested. “How come my idea’s nonsense and your anglerfish isn’t?! Just because it’s harmless doesn’t mean it’s nonsense. If I win the bet, we don’t get eaten!”

“The house always wins.”

“Okay. Where do your hopes lie? Would you rather _I’m_ right or _you’re_ right?” Atem snapped.

“Me. Because if it’s a billboard, rest assured, my marketing team will be here in no time,” Kaiba said, as Atem rolled his eyes, huffing out a laugh.

They were both wrong.

It was a rectangular opening in the rock, an illuminated basement door. A narrow and unlit flight of stairs descended into the earth, a tilting black tunnel. At the end of it, a dim light was spilling out of an unseen room. 

They stood at the top, too baffled to feel the loss of the bet, and staring down the throaty red darkness of the stairwell, wondering what kind of teeth they might find at the end. 

“...hm,” Kaiba said.

“Right,” Atem agreed.

 _“I’m_ not scared,” Kaiba announced, because fear was a shameful emotion.

“Me neither,” Atem said, because he wasn’t alone.

“Then it’s settled. We’re going down.”

They took a moment to make themselves presentable, using each other as mirrors: Kaiba adjusted Atem’s headdress, straightened the fastenings of his cloak; Atem swept red dust off Kaiba’s white coat with his hands and patted some life back into the wilting tongues of his buckles. Kaiba huffed on the Puzzle, swiping an invisible spot of dust away with his thumb, and Atem turned the Duel Disk on.

Kaiba went down first, each footstep dull and without echo. Atem followed him, several steps behind, tempted to reach out and touch the top of his head. At the bottom Kaiba briefly became a dark silhouette, the light before him brighter than the light behind him, and stopped on the threshold. 

“Kaiba?” Atem said. “What is it?”

Kaiba turned around. This simple, swift about-face alone walloped Atem with anxiety.

“Go back up. Don’t come down until I call your name,” Kaiba said.

“What did you see?”

“Atem, do it.”

“I’m not leaving you to face whatever it is alone - hey!”

Kaiba made his request unarguable: he grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him around, and gave him a light but unequivocal shove. 

“Please,” he added, and that, more than the shove, convinced Atem to go back up the stairs, abandoning Kaiba at the bottom of the stairwell, taking his guilt with him.

He came back out into the cold night air and stepped past the boundary of the light.

He waited.

Kaiba had yet to call his name.

As usual when he was anxious, Atem fiddled with the Puzzle, running his thumb along its geometric contours, mapping out its familiar labyrinth: this groove turned left here, that one ran straight to the edge of the face, these two grooves intersected, making four perfect corners. It was useful to have the Puzzle, even now. As something that used to hold a soul, it was an ideal prison for the parts of himself he hated: resentment at being sent off alone, his careless ease with violence, his ignorance of certain things.

“Atem?” came the quiet voice, a doubtful stage whisper, acting out a semblance of courage. And again, louder, a rapid, desperate bark: “ATEM!”

“Kaiba! I’m here!” Atem called back. He went flying down the staircase, cloak billowing behind him with the swiftness of his steps. At the bottom, Kaiba caught him by the arms, all the hardness of his features washed away by an obvious flood of relief. He swallowed, schooling his traitorous face. 

“Now I know this isn’t a dream,” he said. “Although I don’t know if that makes this better.” 

“Of course it’s not a dream,” Atem said.

“I didn’t know that for certain. Let’s go back to the ship.”

“Wait. What’s in the room?”

“Nothing of value to us,” Kaiba said. “I came, I saw, I changed my mind. Nothing worth conquering.”

“I want to see,” Atem said. “I didn’t come all this way not to find out what’s at the bottom of the stairs! If it really is nothing, there’s no reason for me not to see it. If it’s _something,_ then maybe I should see it! You don’t need to protect me!”

Trapped by this logic, Kaiba made a final token resistance, hissing his displeasure sharply through his teeth. Atem brushed past him into the room.

It was a seedy affair, the kind of room that hid its flaws and grime with dim lighting. In its decor, it was an imitation of roadside casinos, with a kaleidoscopic carpet and faux-marble walls and green-felted poker tables standing on muscular wooden legs. Opposite the door was a long, stately bar, with a wall of colorful liquors in crystal-cut bottles, illuminated by pale blue back light. The air had a withered smell of dust and smoke, thick with the leftover ghosts of some long-gone smokers. The ashtrays still held small piles of limp, burned-out butts. This was a place where solitude, for the length of a cigarette, could be enjoyed.

Behind the bar was Pegasus, looking crisp and polished and obscenely alive, polishing a glass with a white towel. He was dressed like an upscale magician, sporting a purple crushed-velvet brocade vest over a paisley shirt, topped off with a bowtie that was somehow chic instead of ridiculous. There was a little cloud of smoke where the Millennium Eye used to be.

“Well, don’t just stand there looking gormless,” he said. “Sit down. Have a drink.”

“Maybe he’s... not actually Pegasus,” Atem said, in an undertone. Kaiba was holding himself very still - the animal stillness of a hunt, his shoulders braced, his fists clenched, as though any moment wings or claws would burst from his body. Fight or flight. “Not _our_ Pegasus.”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here, you fluffed-up little parakeet,” Pegasus snapped. “It’s rude!”

“Uh - my apologies,” Atem blurted out. “Our… ship ran into some mechanical issues. Is there… anyone… ?”

There was no one else in the bar. 

"I don't need help. I just need time," Kaiba muttered.

“Your ship will be fixed. In the meantime, order a drink,” Pegasus said. “You leave those at the door, however. In the cloakroom. There are no weapons allowed in this establishment.”

He nodded at the Duel Disk and the Puzzle. Just to Atem's right was a door into a cloakroom, with a small wooden bench and several coat hooks. Atem took hold of the Puzzle cord, bowing his head to take it off - Kaiba flung a hand to his chest, stopping him mid-motion.

“Atem, don't,” he growled, hatred bleeding through his teeth. "I will not."

Pegasus raised an eyebrow.

"Well, what is it, Kaiba-boy? Are you a man of war or a man of peace?"

"A man of peace can still defend himself!" Kaiba snarled back - and jumped as Pegasus slapped the counter with the towel, loudly punctuating his annoyance.

"You may bring your will to live into this bar. But you will _not_ bring your will to punish or kill! Leave that out back in the garbage, with the rats, the damned, and the wild dogs!" he shouted. "I won't have you spilling blood and oil on my countertops! The dirtiness of your soul is a bitch to clean!"

"Very well. We'll remove them," Atem said, before Kaiba could speak, because something in Pegasus' voice made all the empty glasses hanging from the racks vibrate and rattle, and all his nerves shrivel and writhe, a voice like salt on a garden slug. Some type of god. Or a demon? A manifestation? An infestation?

He turned to Kaiba, taking hold of the Duel Disk.

"Traitor," Kaiba hissed, as Atem fumbled with the latches.

“I’ve beaten him before. You don't need this," he said, pulling it off. He set it on the bench with the Puzzle and hung up his cloak. After a silent, bristling pause, Kaiba removed his coat and hung it beside the cloak.

 _"Thank_ you," Pegasus said, all smiles as they took their seats at the bar, on two plump swivel stools that squeaked under their weight. "What can I get for you, Pinkie and the Vain?" 

"A beer, please," Atem said. "Whatever you have on tap that's not too dark. Something light."

"I have just the ticket," Pegasus said, and went to the other end of the bar, where the taps stood like colorful Bauhaus spears.

"You should order something," Atem said sideways.

"I don't trust this," Kaiba whispered back. "I will not be held hostage to the whims of some fucking madman in a dorky bowtie."

"Really? I think it's cute. A little out-dated, style-wise, but - "

 _"You're_ out-dated, you dusty relic. I'm not ordering a drink. I wanted to go back to the ship."

“Then leave, and I’ll drink by myself. If it’s poison, I’m just going back to Aaru, like you said - ”

Kaiba raised his voice. "Pegasus, a perfect martini. Three olives and your top-shelf vermouth."

At the end of the bar, Pegasus acknowledged the request with a wink and a spry salute. 

“I’m not leaving _you_ here alone, either,” Kaiba growled, sottovoce.

Within minutes, Pegasus set down a golden, bubbling beer, its head a fluffy cloud, lines of white froth spilling down the sides with vulgar suggestion. Beside it he set an ice-grey martini, three fat green blurs lying at the bottom of the glass, both drinks on blue cardboard coasters advertising an unintelligible brand of liquor.

“Now,” he said. “Before you drink, you have to pay. I’m tired of people skimping on the tab.”

Kaiba frowned, his hand sliding into his back pocket. He brought his wallet to Aaru? Atem smirked at the thought, lifting his hands to undo his earring.

Pegasus waved them down. “None of that. Your material wealth is no good to me. In exchange for these drinks, you owe me a secret. Any secret. But it has to be true.”

Their hands returned to neutral positions, Kaiba crossing his arms, Atem lacing his fingers loosely atop the bar. He fumbled through himself for a secret, sorting through memories, petty jealousies, poorly-written papyrus hidden in distant vases. Several white lies, several black lies, and at least six or seven regrets.

“I, uh,” he said, the middle of the sentence collapsing with a nervous exhale; “I didn’t want to go to Aaru.”

“Try again. That’s not a secret. That's ordinary," Pegasus said, with a canny smile. “Kaiba-boy?”

Atem, smarting from this baseball-bat blow of inadequacy, stared at his beer, counting the columns of bubbles as they rose up to join the froth, digging deeper into himself.

Next to him, Kaiba’s eyes were clear and cold.

“I miss my mother more than my father,” he said. Rising to the challenge, as always. Atem flinched against the sharp edge of this secret, its severing twist of tragedy. Kaiba’s face was stony with triumph.

“Ooh! Delightful. Freud would have a field day,” Pegasus said. “You can open a tab on that one, if you like. Tell me! What do you miss most about her? Are you jealous with your memories, or do you share them with Mokuba? Do you ever blame him for her death?”

“Those questions are outside the bounds of this transaction,” Kaiba said, in a voice as flat as a knife. He put his fingertips on the cardboard coaster and carefully pulled his drink closer. He did not drink, casting an expectant glance at Atem. 

The words collected on Atem’s tongue, as dry and dead and ready to burn as autumn leaves. I don’t know. I have no secrets. My secrets are not good enough. My secrets fill me with shame. I never enjoyed the taste of Yuugi’s mother’s cooking. Kaiba, I question your forgiveness of me, but you get offended whenever I question your judgment, but you also listen to me. Which is it? A fine line to walk! A tightrope! An eighth regret: walking into this bar. How do you clean a soul? I don’t think of Kaiba’s soul as dirty. I’ve seen it and it gleams, you bastard! Why ARE we here? The bubbles continued to rise. 

“I don’t - are you angry with me for leaving? Without telling you?” he said, and both Kaiba and Pegasus stared at him. 

“Yes,” Kaiba growled acidly. “I will not make _that_ a secret.”

“Is it wrong that your anger makes me happy? I can’t explain it. But knowing that you’re furious with me, when no one else was… it satisfies me,” Atem said, making sure to look Kaiba in the eye, like he deserved. “That’s my secret.”

“Oh, how nasty. Sadistic and selfish, exactly the way love should be,” Pegasus gushed, pushing the beer towards Atem, who took it with a feeling of miserable defeat. 

“Cheers,” he said glumly, tapping his glass against Kaiba’s. And they drank, the beer crisp and grassy, fizzling across Atem’s tongue; the martini tumbling like a sharp, cold star down Kaiba’s throat. 

They continued to drink, saying nothing. Pegasus hummed to himself as he cleaned and polished glasses. Kaiba moodily speared all three of his olives onto a toothpick, one by one by one, and did not eat them. With his glass drained to a quarter-full and his hungry stomach sloshing with beer, a warm static was washing through Atem’s mind, all the knots of his thoughts loosening as they submerged in alcohol.

“You said the Dimension Cannon would be fixed,” Kaiba said. “How?”

Pegasus laughed, waltzing past them with his palms up and out, a flirty little shrug. 

“Who knows, Kaiba-boy! Maybe you’ll fix it. Or maybe it’ll fix itself?”

“That’s ridiculous. The Dimension Cannon can’t fix itself, I have to do it,” Kaiba snapped, scowling.

“You are such a bore,” Pegasus sneered. “Your fantasies have always been dull, pedestrian clichés. Dragons and power and fucking in your office. Power is an aphrodisiac, blah blah blah. You crossed several dimensions to go to the Ancient Egyptian afterlife in search of love, and now you’re sitting at a bar in downtown &#/#/#/#/#/# with two dead men, and yet you can’t imagine your nifty interstellar go-kart can fix herself. That hurts her feelings, you know. You built a capable little machine, and you should give her more credit.”

A hot red flush rose up Kaiba’s neck and flared across his cheeks, more anger than alcohol.

“Y - _where_ did you say we are?” he said, his confusion handily trouncing his ire. Atem thought it one of his most redeeming qualities: a desire for knowledge, superseding a desire for vengeance.

“&#/#/#/#/#/#, obviously,” Pegasus chuffed, and Atem winced against the oily, steel wool sounds. “Come on! Read the map! You’re supposed to be the smart one!”

Atem took another gulp of his beer. It was stronger than heqet. Much, much stronger.

“I’m not dead anymore,” he insisted fuzzily. 

Pegasus’s attention swerved back to him, leaning over the bar with both hands on the wood, silver hair swinging forward off his shoulders. 

“Oh, you’re not? Okay, Lazarus. Tell me what it means to be alive,” he purred, with a gleeful smile.

“Does that make me Jesus?” Kaiba slurred to himself.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you. Martyrdom is another one of your pet fantasies,” Pegasus snorted. “But yes. According to the conceit, you are! Atem! Answer the question!”

Atem startled in his seat. “I don’t know!”

“According to ancient Egyptian religious philosophy, true death happens when you’ve been completely forgotten,” Kaiba said, without a single vodka-tripped syllable, and Atem stared at him. 

Pegasus laughed, a low, ugly sound, each beat falling like rotten fruit from a tree. “So is Gozaburo really dead then?”

“Shut up,” Kaiba snarled, a maroon thunder cracking across his face, as Atem also snarled: “Leave him alone!”

“So touchy. You still haven’t given me an answer, Atem-boy,” Pegasus sang. “How do you know you’re not dead?”

Atem thunked his elbows on the countertop, resting his forehead against his hands, thinking, trying very hard to remember what it was like in Aaru. He was just there! Hours ago! Death was idyllic, quiet, full of sun. The fruit was always ripe. He missed his friends but knew he’d see them again someday, and death was just waiting. Yes. He seized the conclusion and sealed it with a hefty gulp of beer, finishing the glass. So why was he alive again? Pegasus set another glass of beer before him.

Kaiba threw back the rest of his martini and slid the empty glass towards Pegasus with a venomous frown. Pegasus refilled that, too. 

“I - ” Kaiba started.

“Shush. No one cares what you have to say! Let the parakeet think!”

“Let him speak,” Atem said, falling into his second glass, floundering in a puddle of beer and memories. The eternal two AM lights of an arcade. Incense in the temple. Classrooms at dusk, the air clouding with clapped erasers. His father had died a fool, crushed by the sickening knowledge of his own ignorance. “I care what he has to say.”

“The feeling is mutual,” Kaiba muttered.

“My totemic animal is falcons, not parakeets.”

“I know. I confess I’ve always envied your wings, your ability to fly. Jackals don’t have wings. We live on all fours, dragging our bellies across the wretched, steaming earth. It’s humiliating.”

“What were you going to say?” Atem said, blushing. “About death?”

“Oh,” Kaiba said, frowning. “Yes. Right. The heat death of the universe. Some physicists theorize that one day, the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, which means it would be unable to sustain processes that increase energy. In short, the universe will reach thermodynamic equilibrium, also known as maximum entropy, and… the universe will stop... _happening._ It will stop changing. It will become an undifferentiated static of matter, at a consistent, unchanging temperature.”

“Very good, Kaiba-boy. Top marks. You rattled that off without a single mistake.”

“Obviously. The collapse of order is the way of the world. I have reversed death itself. And if I make a mistake, you'll hurt me,” Kaiba said. 

Atem unfolded an arm, placing his hand palm up on the bar, beckoning. 

“Hand,” he ordered.

Kaiba hesitated. 

He laid his hand in Atem’s. 

Atem squeezed his hand.

Kaiba hesitated again, running through a litany of possible meanings for this new gesture: pity? superiority? grief? compassion? this should not have happened to you. offering my hand to you is only an acknowledgement that you have suffered, that you did not deserve it, that if death is a state of unchanging, then you are the most alive person I know, and also I love you!

He squeezed back, beaming with victory. They had successfully revised Newton’s Third Law with the brand-new, hot-off-the-press Atem-Kaiba Corollary (he was feeling especially magnanimous, and let Atem’s name come first; after all, Atem had fought just as hard for it): when two furious and frightened card game-loving fools interact, they apply forces to each other of equal magnitude and in a better direction. 

“So you’re saying death is a state of maximum entropy?” Pegasus said. “Death begins when you stop changing?”

“Yes. My dreams about death never change,” Kaiba said smugly, pleased with his logic.

“I want to change,” Atem whined. “I don’t want to play death games anymore. The last one I played, I lost.”

“Don’t change too much,” Kaiba said. “I came for you. Not some... anti-Atem.”

“What if I become someone you don’t like? I don’t want you to hate me.”

Kaiba let go of his hand. Atem’s empty palm twitched with its cold absence. But Kaiba, inspired to bravery by the martini and the hand-holding, slung a warm, heavy arm around his shoulders, drawing him closer, squeezing his bare arm. He pressed a damp kiss to his temple. 

“Become only yourself,” he said, into Atem's wild hair. “That means everything to me.”

“That’s so sweet of you, Kaiba-boy. Last call.”

“We’ve had enough. I think I’ll take him back to the Dimension Cannon now. We’ll sleep it off and go home in the morning.”

“Safe travels!” Pegasus called, as Kaiba nudged Atem off the stool, put on his cloak and the Puzzle, and guided him upstairs. 

Atem sniffed, abruptly discovering he’d become a maudlin drunk, walking with both arms around Kaiba’s waist and his face buried in his warm, strong torso. Kaiba’s arm was again around his shoulders. He was warm everywhere and his thoughts were swimming. He was at the end of desire; what he wanted was in the want-shaped hole. Whatever happened next was a sign of life. 

“I feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be,” he said, ignoring the gaze of a thousand nameless stars as they swayed drunkenly across the desert. Not one of _you,_ anymore! “Do you?”

“It was just an accident,” Kaiba said, misunderstanding the question.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in less than 24 hours. yeehaw. please kindly alert me to typoz.
> 
> Tioumoutiri is what the ancient Egyptians called Venus in the morning; Ouaiti is what they called it at night. Female Hippopotamus, Divine Lion, etc. are real ancient Egyptian names of constellations, at least according to [this paper I found.](http://research.iac.es/proyecto/arqueoastronomia//media/Belmonte_Shaltout_Chapter_6.pdf)
> 
> Thanks for reading! <3


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